The MZ-R91 - Older, and Wiser! (Sony MD Walkman MZ-R91)

Member Name: basketcase006

Product:	Sony MD Walkman MZ-R91
Date:	09/08/03 (394 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Superb sound quality, Doubles as dictaphone, Very small and stylish, with backlit blue remote

Disadvantages: Small buttons make for hard labelling, Slightly outdated now

I have been a fan of portable audio for as long as I can remember, and now long gone are the days I would walk around with my personal cassette player in my pocket. When I discovered minidisc I was over the moon. A medium which has both excellent sound quality and a very small size. I saw it as a new way to enjoy music on the move, and its skip-free!

I recently upgraded from an older model to the MZ-R91. I know that it is now an older model itself but it still looked the part, which is what attracted me to it. The recorder has a metallic blue finish with an oval LCD display in the centre, and is about the size of a minidisc but a little thicker. The inline remote that is supplied is also great, I love the fact that it is backlit, this is very helpful for when I’m walking somewhere at night and I want to quickly change tracks. The earphones that are supplied with the unit have a pretty much perfect clarity to them, and I have never had any problems with them.

Enough about the aesthetics of the unit, and onto the actually functioning of it. The buttons are nicely set out on the unit and the remote and it is easy to play a disc, skip track etc... The unit is a recorder, and is supplied with an optical cable. You simply plug the cable into the recorder and a hi-fi and press record. The recorder will then put a whole cd onto a single minidisc, and there is usually space for two albums on an 80-minute minidisc. Using the optical cable, the sound quality easily equals that of cd, and the unit has no problem reproducing high quality sound. Once a cd is recorded, it is simple to title it and name the tracks using the remote control. The buttons can sometimes be a little hard to press and it can be somewhat fiddly, but there is a feature with the recorder to save frequently used titles for ease of labelling.

The minidisc also has a lineout feature, which means it can be plugged into a hi-fi and used as an auxiliary means of playing music. I

have also found this recorder to be useful as a dictaphone, as the earphones can double as a microphone. This means that the recorder can be used for either music, or as an aid in everyday life at work or for studying. I think this dual functionality is a great feature, and has been really useful for me personally.

The battery life of this recorder is excellent. It is supplied with a NimH 'Chewing Gum' battery, which is flat and hence minimizes the size of the unit. Once the unit is fully charged via the supplied AC adaptor, the recorder can be used for days in playback mode and several hours for recording. Another smart feature of the MZ-R91 is the AA battery pack which comes as an add-on to the unit. This means you can strap on an AA battery if you need a bit of extra power. This comes in very handy on long journeys. The recorder also has a 40 second anti-shock mechanism, which means that it pretty much never skips during playback like many CD players do. It has only skipped once or twice in six months for me so I have no worries there!

Overall, the MZ-R91 may well be out dated in comparison to the new 'NetMD' range, but I still believe that it is a solid machine, and does the job above and beyond the call of duty, as it were. It has excellent sound quality, great battery life, and is small and tough enough to survive days on end in my pocket! So, if you're thinking about getting one, do it. They're not expensive anymore and you'll be bagging a bargain!

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